


Tethered

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Day 3: Fuse, F/M, Soulmate AU, Zutara Week, Zutara Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25572229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Katara thinks about soulmates often.Her Gran-Gran told her the story, once: how soulmates are tethered (she likes that word, tethered – stronger than connected, softer than chained), how young some of them are when they hear the first evidence of that Tether. How soulmates hear each others’ thoughts sometimes, even before they know they’re soulmates, even before they meet. She loves the idea that a little part of her is in someone else’s mind even now.Katara and Zuko through the years, sharing thoughts and finding each other.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 43
Kudos: 441





	Tethered

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to @MaliaIsBoring for all but begging me to write a soulmate AU for this prompt because I honestly had no idea what to write. This ended up being one of my favorite Zutara Week oneshots, so I have to thank her for that! I hope you guys enjoy this, overabundance of line breaks and all.

**6 / 8**

Katara thinks about soulmates often. 

Her Gran-Gran told her the story, once: how soulmates are tethered (she likes that word, _tethered_ – stronger than _connected_ , softer than _chained),_ how young some of them are when they hear the first evidence of that Tether. How soulmates hear each others’ thoughts sometimes, even before they know they’re soulmates, even before they _meet._ She loves the idea that a little part of her is in someone else’s mind even now. 

She’s only six and she knows she’s too young to know who he is yet, but she is the _perfect_ age for dreaming, and she dreams about the man whose mind she occupies often. She wonders what he’ll be like. 

(A little part of her hopes he’s going to be a Waterbender like her, because she can’t _imagine_ anything more wonderful than meeting a boy like her and being _meant for each other-_ ) 

But then she runs from her hut and suddenly soulmates are the least and last of her worries. 

* * *

Zuko isn’t so sure how he feels about the stories of soulmates that his mother has told him. It’s a little bit creepy, he can’t help but think - he doesn’t know how much he likes the idea of someone else being able to read his mind. But his mother says that the day his Tether manifests for the first time will be the best day of his life, and she’d never lie to him, so it must not be so horrible, sharing your brain with someone else. 

  
It’ll just take some getting used to. 

But he starts to rethink that conclusion at eight years old when, one day in his calligraphy lesson, he hears the voice of a little girl in his mind, even her thoughts crying for help. She is in anguish, that much he can tell, and the wave of grief and anger and confusion that washes over him when her thoughts start to worm their way into his brain are so terrifying to hold in his mind that all he can do is run into his mother’s waiting arms and cry, because she was _wrong._ His mother was _wrong._

He knows that these thoughts come from his Tether, which can only mean his Tethered is suffering, and her suffering is so profound he can’t make sense of it. It is _not_ the best day of his life. 

(A handful of years later, he can empathize, and he’s not sure whether his heart aches for himself, his mother, or his Tethered, because now he knows what she felt that day from firsthand experience and it hurts more than flame meeting flesh or the sting of lost honor.) 

* * *

**11/13**

It’s been a while since Katara had space in her brain for anything but necessities. She’s got to make sure her household stays up and running because Gran-Gran is aging rapidly and Sokka is decidedly _not,_ and silly trivialities like soulmate Tethers are the furthest things from her mind. She barely even remembers the story now, so irrelevant does it seem. 

(No soulmate is going to come save her, she knows - and if any saving is going to get done around here, it’s going to have to be her doing.) 

But she has cause to remember one day at eleven when she’s stirring a pot of stew and feels a wave of pain and distress so intense and so overpowering that she falls to her knees, instinctively ducking and covering her head with her hands as if the ceiling is going to collapse in on her. The thoughts in her head aren’t even coherent - just a lot of _try-not-to-cry_ and _I-thought-he-loved-me_ and _what-do-I-do-now,_ sentiments she somehow makes sense of even though she has no idea what’s actually happening or _who_ it’s happening to or _what_ any of these thoughts actually mean.

  
Gran-Gran finds her huddled on the floor next to the cooking fire, whimpering, and a grave expression clouds her face. And when Katara meets her eyes, she knows. 

Her Tethered is in pain. 

She briefly wonders if it’s a bad omen that her first contact with her Tether came in a moment of such great suffering, but she brushes that thought aside quickly. What’s harder to discard is the overwhelming betrayal she felt on his behalf when his thoughts met hers for the first time.

She doesn’t know if she’ll _ever_ forget that. 

* * *

Once, a few nights into his banishment, Zuko remembers his mother’s story and wonders if his Tether felt his pain the night he was branded - _failure, traitor, outcast_ written on his face for the world to see - the way he felt her loss that night when he was eight. 

But he tells himself to give up, because not even the evidence of his Tether that he’s already felt is enough to convince him that _anyone_ could love him when his own family could not. 

* * *

**14/16**

Katara regrets every decision she’s ever made as a boy with a truly tragic ponytail that emerges as if by magic from a bald head ( _who let him go out like that?_ She thinks, in a vain effort to keep things lighthearted enough to stop herself from losing it) wraps a rope around her wrists, then the tree she’s standing against, spouting off some nonsense about _honor_ all the while, and Katara should be terrified but really she’s just _annoyed._

_What a pompous windbag,_ she thinks, right as a foreign thought drifts through her mind. 

_She’s beautiful,_ it says, and Katara’s eyes widen. She doesn’t take long to realize what’s happening. 

She questions her Tethered’s timing, though. As much as she welcomes the distraction from her captor’s rather obnoxious and decidedly overblown blather about honor, he could really have waited a few minutes. 

* * *

Zuko is rather amazed that the Waterbender girl he’s trying to restrain doesn’t appear to be particularly intimidated by him - she seems more _annoyed_ than anything, really. It’s almost impressive. 

  
(Would be if it weren’t so _inconvenient.)_

And it’s hard to deny that she’s...well. An attractive girl about his age. And no matter how inconvenient, that makes an impression on him. And he’s especially aware of that fact as she gazes back at him, unimpressed, with neither fear nor admiration in her clear blue eyes. 

_She’s beautiful,_ he can’t help but think. _What a pompous windbag._

_Wait, what?_

He blinks a few times. Those words were _definitely_ not among the ones he’d use to refer to his prisoner and he, quite frankly, had no idea why they’d popped into his head -

_Oh. Wait._

That must have been his Tethered. _Great timing,_ he thinks. _Just...fantastic. Do you have to do this_ now? 

The girl eventually gets free, of course, as he figured she might. He’s surprised to find that he doesn’t feel any remorse for his failure to restrain her. 

None whatsoever. He _does_ hope she’ll learn to appreciate a well-practiced speech, though. 

* * *

**_15/17_ **

Katara can barely stand to look as she smooths the glowing water over the star-shaped welt on Zuko’s abdomen, tears threatening to slip free at any moment. Her heart is pounding, her hands are shaking, and her mind is _buzzing_ because she has no idea what to make of this moment, or the boy who’d willingly risk life and limb for a girl who, for the vast majority of their lives, considered him the face of all that was wrong with her world. 

She thinks she feels something she’s not ready to admit to yet. 

But right now all she can think is _stay with me, please._

And he does. 

And it’s then that she hears the now-familiar voice of her Tethered’s thoughts like a heartbeat in her mind: 

_I love her, I love her, I love her._

She blinks back tears and helps Zuko stand, faintly wondering what prompted that when she’s nowhere near the Tethered she’s still never met. Part of her hates the idea of it, her Tethered proclaiming his love to another if only in his mind. 

(But part of her - the part that’s never felt so sure - hopes that her Tethered never stops loving whoever he’s confessing to without words, hopes she’ll be free to determine her own path, hopes she’ll never have to leave the boy by her side.) 

* * *

Zuko has no need for uncertainty anymore, because if an alarming willingness to risk his for someone was not proof enough that what he’d been feeling was no accident, no fluke, no product of the heat of the moment, he didn’t know what was. 

And when he wakes up and feels Katara’s arms cradling him and her tears falling against the bare, scarred skin where his tunic has burned away, he’s more certain than he’s ever been of anything in his life. 

_I love her,_ he realizes, and soon the thought takes root in his mind and pounds against its walls like a heartbeat: _I love her, I love her, I love her._

He thanks her, she thanks him, they fall silent. And as he shakily stands a thought he knows isn’t his own crosses his mind. 

_Stay with me,_ it says. 

He wonders if his Tethered is on the battlefields below, begging a wounded compatriot or friend or - his stomach clenches at the thought - _lover_ to survive for her sake. 

He wonders if that person is going to stay, or if they’ll slip away and that’ll be how he meets his Tethered, and this is the _worst_ time and place for a thought like that but, as Katara’s arms support him and he tries to stand, he hopes they’ll make it.

(Because he’s starting to wish he’d never learned what those thoughts meant, that he’d been allowed to believe _he_ was free to determine what was love and what was not. 

This is it, but it might not be his choice.) 

* * *

**_17/19_ **

Ambassador Katara of the Southern Water Tribe is, and has always, _always_ been, _vehemently_ opposed to the very idea of a party being thrown in her honor, but there’s little she can do about it now. 

So, the night she turns seventeen, she finds herself walking into one of the Fire Palace’s ballrooms, infrequently-used but undeniably grand in the firelight with every inch covered in opulent decor (all in blue, at Zuko’s insistence - _that,_ at least, causes a smile to tug at the corner of her mouth). And though in her year as Ambassador she’s found that there are many who detest the very presence of a teenage Waterbender in the Fire Lord’s court, she enters the room to applause. 

Her cheeks go hot, and though she knows the bulk of the whooping probably comes from her friends (none of her colleagues would _dare_ be so uncivilized at a state function, but Sokka and Toph and Aang and Suki - well, maybe not Suki - are another story), who arrived yesterday to reunite in celebration of her birthday, she’s embarrassed, unused to the attention. 

Surveying the room once the formal introduction of the guest of honor is done, she notices that the bulk of the guests are dancing already, while a few others are scattered about at the tables of food lining the walls (Sokka is in heaven, she’s certain), talking, politicking, or otherwise catching up. She hasn’t the slightest idea what _she_ is supposed to be doing, but she does her best to do it anyway, before realizing she’s hopeless and making her way over to her friends for what she knows will probably be the few stress-free moments she gets all night. 

Then Zuko approaches their group, and she says goodbye to any hope of a little break from the anxiety of the evening, because he’s full-on _staring_ as he walks up to her and it takes everything she has to deny that she _loves_ the feeling, wants to bask in his admiration, would do it all night if she could. He’s blushing, she notes with amusement - and, if she’s being honest, she’s sure she is too. 

And judging by the group falls silent when they see him, she isn’t the only one who notices that the air seems to crackle with electricity when he’s in her vicinity. 

At first, neither speaks; Zuko clutches at the stem of a delicate glass of rice wine with such force that she wonders how it hasn’t broken yet, and Katara wrings her hands, waiting for him to speak because she’s got no idea what to say. 

_Come on, you know what words are!_

Katara’s eyes widen in surprise, because although the admonition certainly pertains to her current circumstances, she knows that she wasn’t the source of that thought. She wants to laugh into her hand because, though she’s a little disillusioned with the idea of soulmates by now (this electricity - and knowing she’ll have to give it up whenever she meets the man who shares her mind - makes sure of that), it seems fitting that they’re _both_ speechless.

_How funny that we’re both at a loss for words,_ she thinks, glancing at the ground.  
  
When she looks back up, Zuko’s face is white as a sheet and he’s dropped his glass. And she’s too frozen to move before it shatters at their feet. 

* * *

Zuko wants to throw himself into a bottomless pit the second he sees Katara enter the ballroom, but no such pit is available, so sadly, he realizes he must content himself with awkward avoidance. 

  
He skirts the edges of the ballroom at first, talking to his friends whenever possible and the less-hostile ambassadors when it isn’t, and it works fine. He has no need to speak to her. But he _also_ soon realizes that he can’t stop stealing glances in whatever direction points to Katara. 

(Whatever genius in Katara’s staff decided that it would be advisable to dress his favorite ambassador in a cobalt-blue robe - Water Tribe in color, Fire Nation in cut - had absolutely _no idea_ that they had singlehandedly and totally inadvertently come closer to bringing the Fire Lord to an untimely end than any assassin who’d ever made an attempt on his life. She is too stunning for words and the seamless mixing of her culture and his gives him a traitorous thread of hope that he cannot snap no matter how hard he tries.) 

But eventually he can’t ignore his guest of honor, so when Toph, smirking, makes a snarky comment about his heart rate and pushes him in the direction of their group, he resignedly walks over - 

And finds himself completely, _utterly_ speechless, because Katara is a _thousand_ times more stunning up-close and he wishes more than ever that the bottomless pit he so longs for would appear beneath his feet right now. 

(He considers asking Toph to earthbend such a hole in the ground but thinks better of it.) 

_Come on, you can speak words,_ he admonishes himself. _Seriously? You make dozens of speeches a year and you can’t even say five words to your best friend because she looks prettier than usual?_

(Understatement of the century, he knows.) 

He’s about to blurt out something, _anything,_ just to get words out of his mouth, when a thought crosses his mind: _how funny that we’re both at a loss for words._

He _knows_ that voice, and the statement is so uncannily _relevant_ that he can scarcely believe it, and Katara won’t even look at him, and-

_Wait._

His eyes widen, his face blanches, and the delicate crystal wineglass he’s holding plummets to the floor. 

* * *

**_18/20_ **

Katara is _not_ in the mood for another council meeting.

Normally she wouldn’t mind. She loves her job, loves affecting real change in her world, loves working with Zuko (she can admit that now). But she does _not_ love the constant bickering and she _especially_ does not love any meeting with the words “taxation,” “tariffs,” or “trade agreements” in the agenda scrolls she receives before she attends, and right now, with the envoy from Omashu and a Northern Water Tribe representative going at it with abandon over a tax on imported furs, she’s getting a hefty dose of _all_ of those things. 

It’s hard to stay professional under such conditions: one minute she’s nodding off, the next she’s resisting the urge to shoot confused looks at Zuko (who _has_ to keep a straight face, poor thing). One minute she’s fantasizing about lunch (is she turning into Sokka? It’s a legitimate concern), the next she’s remembering something Zuko said earlier about his advisors pressuring him to take a Fire Lady (which makes her stomach turn), and then when she _does_ try to pay attention -

“It’s not _our_ fault that your people aren’t receptive to our terms!” the Omashu envoy is shouting at his adversary across the room. 

“We’d be more _receptive_ if you had something better to offer!” the Northern Water Tribe ambassador shoots back, and Katara’s five seconds from leaving the room in frustration when a thought enters her mind unbidden. 

_Yeah. That's what she said._

Her Tethered’s joke is immature and really not even all that funny, but the fact that it’s so _relevant_ makes it impossible for her not to react, and, to her horror, she can’t stifle a giggle. 

She quickly covers it with a cough, praying it’ll be enough to salvage her reputation, and slips out of the room in mortification, muttering something about needing a drink of water. 

She doesn’t stick around long enough to see Zuko get up and follow her. 

* * *

Zuko’s heart is hammering in his chest as he follows Katara. He’s so absorbed that he doesn’t even hear the Minister of Finance declare a recess. “Katara!” he calls after her as she bolts for a washroom. 

She turns at the sound of his voice. Terror crosses her face, but she stops, and when he finally reaches her (and no, he is absolutely _not_ above running when it matters this much), she looks like she wants to melt into the wall she’s backed up against. 

“I’m so sorry,” she says breathlessly. “I swear, I didn’t-“

“Katara, do you know what a Tether is?” 

She raises her eyebrows. “Of course. Why?” 

“Have you ever heard from yours?” he asks, panting to catch his breath. 

Katara nods. “A few times, yeah. Why?” 

“Because I think you just laughed at a joke I didn’t even say out loud,” he says. His heart is hammering against his ribcage and he _prays_ he wasn’t wrong. 

Her eyes widened. “‘That’s what she said’? That was _you?”_

Zuko can’t describe a single one of the million thoughts running through his mind, but he knows that they’re not all his and the ones that aren’t are like a burst of brilliant color, a riot of sound and and emotion rampaging through his brain. 

And he knows _exactly_ what his mother was talking about now. 

“It was me,” he says. “It _is_ me.” 

And her eyes widen all over again but this time it’s joy in them and not shock, and Katara throws her arms around him and latches on tight. He remembers they’re in public and has to resist the urge to spin her around and kiss her breathless the moment her feet hit the floor, but that won’t stop him from holding on as tightly as she is. 

“It’s _you,”_ she says in awe. “That explains so _much.”_

“I had my suspicions, but...I was so scared, Katara,” he admits. 

She pulls back a little. “Scared? Of what?”

He leans forward to press his forehead to hers. “Scared I was tethered to someone who wasn’t you.” 

“Why would that scare you?” She smiles to herself as she plays with the collar of his robes. _She’s going to make me say it, isn’t she,_ Zuko realizes. 

“Because I already knew who I wanted to be Tethered to,” he whispers, cupping her chin because this collar thing she’s doing is driving him slightly insane and if he doesn’t do _something_ he‘s going to have a nervous breakdown trying to contain the intensity of everything he feels for her. 

“Well, lucky you,” she says sweetly, blinking up at him with feigned innocence. 

“Lucky me,” he repeats. “Unless-“

Katara rolls her eyes. “Lucky _us,”_ she says. 

“Oh, no, you’re not getting off that easily.” He grins wickedly, reveling in the fact that he can _do_ this now. “If I have to say it, you do too.”

“Oh. All right.” She clears her throat. “I, too, feared the necessity of the severing of my exceptional bond with you as a result of the discovery of my Tethered and am most pleased to have found that it is you-“ 

“And you called _me_ a pompous windbag?” Zuko shakes his head. 

Katara laughs and laughs and _laughs_ at that, and she’s still laughing when she leans in to kiss him. It’s sloppy and not much of a kiss because she can’t seem to _stop_ and now he’s laughing too, but it’s _them,_ and therefore it was perfect. 

(Beside, there will be plenty of time to perfect the art of kissing Katara. 

He has a feeling it’ll be time well-spent.)

* * *

**20/22**

_I can’t believe this is real._

Those are the first words that pass through Katara’s mind as she wakes up. 

A lot has changed in the past twenty-four hours. After all, she’s _royalty_ now, and as of last night, there’s another human in her sleeping quarters (she quite likes that development). But some things don’t. 

And one of those is the way her Tethered wakes before her. 

Right now Zuko is propped up against the pillows. Katara is draped over his chest, head snuggled into the crook of his neck. And he’s looking at her as if every inch of her is more precious than every ounce of gold in every nation. 

“I can’t either,” she murmurs as she leans upwards to kiss him. 

But privately, she’s got a decidedly less romantic greeting in mind. 

* * *

_Morning, pompous windbag._

The thought comes in blearily, the product of his Tethered ( _Fire Lady, wife)’_ s sleep-addled brain. He laughs - it’s so _Katara -_ and drops a kiss against her matted hair as she stirs in his arms. 

“Morning, beautiful,” he tells her. 

And he knows now, beyond a doubt, that every moment before this one has been leading him here. 

  
  



End file.
